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Wednesday, September 03, 2014

2303 Ausgezeichnet

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.
Even though the sound of it is something quite atrocious, I've always wondered
what it might mean.

It certainly sounds like the most
superlative of superlatives. A word like the German "ausgezeichnet."
Which means wonderful. Or out of human imagination or comprehension. Or out of
this world.Conveniently, for
translation purposes, ausgezeichnet actually sounds like out of sight.

German's like that, a practical
language that often easily disassembles into its component syllables. Like
their word for telephone. In its Latin syllable components tele-phone means
distant sounds. In German the word for telephone is fernsprechapparat. Which
literally translates this way: "fern" means "far,"
"sprech" means "speaking," and "apparat" means
"machine" or "apparatus." Fernsprechapparat:
Far-speaking-machine.

Likewise German is pretty
straightforward about the whole seeing and hearing thing. Like when someone
texts you and then says as he or she is closing, "good to hear from
you," when in fact no sound was ever exchanged. Or like when right before
you hang up the phone and are saying goodbye you say, "See you
later."

See you later in German is auf
wiedersehen. "Auf" meaning "on" "wieder"
"again" and "sehen" "see." "On" in this
case can loosely be translated as "on the occasion of" or
"when" or "until." So Auf Wiedersehen is “'Til I see you
again."

But when German folks hang up the
phone the say Auf Wiederhören. Hören has an umlaut over the "o" and
means hear. If we in English were to do that, instead of saying "see you
later" when we say goodbye on the phone we would say "hear you
later."

Actually it sounds pretty cool. So
if you're reading this essay, see you later. And if you're listening to it on
the radio or a podcast, hear you later.